I spent some time down at the Registrar’s office looking at the campaign finance reports filed by Prince William County supervisors, seeing who is listed as vendors to several campaigns. Under the new “ethics” rules adopted by the Board of County Supervisors, there’s a lot of individuals and companies who can no longer be paid with taxpayer funds. I wonder why these supervisors are so eager to fire members of their own staff?

County staff who appear as vendors on Chairman Stewart’s Campaign Finance Reports:

Kitchen Gourmet (the required vendor for all catered events in McCoart)

Prince William County Government, Prince William County Historical Foundation, Greater Prince William Health Center, and Virginia State Board of Elections

Burke and Herbert Bank, TD Bank, and PayPal

Media General and The Old Bridge Observer

A vast number of churches, high schools and local restaurants

Prince William County will now be required to track every business in the county to see if it has ever provided products or services to local political campaigns, and ensure that if that specific business has worked (even unwittingly) with a political campaign that the payment be blocked. Frank Principi can’t submit a reimbursement request for a Verizon cell phone bill, but John Jenkins can, but Jenkins can’t pay AT&T. Caddigan cannot buy postage stamps from the United States Postal Service, but because Chairman Stewart always reimburses his staff for miscellaneous expenses rather than paying the USPS directly, he can. I can only imagine the nightmare this will cause in the county’s finance department.

So far I haven’t seen any supervisors pay electric utilities directly from a campaign account. That should be fun, if some supervisors are blocked from having electricity in their office because NOVEC or Dominion Power provided electric service to a campaign office.

Legislate in haste, litigate at leisure. I don’t think this idiocy will survive long enough for someone to file a lawsuit however, as the county staff must be going berserk as they mull through what this senile proposal will actually mean for them. If for some reason it does stand for any length of time, I can certainly see some serious litigation opportunities here. Not only has the General Assembly not authorized localities to bar companies from doing business with local government simply because a supervisor ate a hamburger in their joint or bought a pen in their store while campaigning for office, but such restrictions probably run afoul of the First Amendment

The opinions expressed here are solely the views of the author, and not representative of the position of any organization, political party, doughnut shop, knitting guild, or waste recycling facility, but may be correctly attributed to the Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy. If anything in the above article has offended you, please click here to receive an immediate apology.

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8 Comments

It is my understanding that the vendor that supplies all the toilet paper at McCoart also supplied toilet paper for the Jenkins campaign and the vendor that supplies all Porta-Potties for the county provided a single transgender urinal/crapper unit for the Principi campaign. Now that stinks!

Now that you mention it, Don’s Johns does appear as a vendor on Corey Stewart’s campaign finance report. Since Prince William County shows up as a vendor also (for renting some space for a campaign event) I have to wonder whether his office is allowed to flush a toilet, use a porta-potty, or will be forced to dig field latrines in the back of the McCoart building. Then again, since the county is a campaign vendor I’m not even sure if his office can occupy space in the McCoart building in the first place.

Now that the discretionary funds are dispensed with, I would suggest that some attention needs to be paid to the budget hold back provisions in the annual budget cycle. Simply when department abc submits it budget for the year for $20, the board votes on that amount and approves it. However, when department abc only uses $18, the $2 left over goes back to the county and the county executive and supervisors can use it as they please WITHOUT another budget vote. It is a neat little budget trick that gives the county executive and supervisors funds to fund projects that might not get through the normal budget cycle. Inflate the budget upfront will guarantee funding for certain projects at the end of the year. They should have applied the GAAP standard of putting the $2 back in the general fund to be re-appropriated under a direct vote. This budget trick is often known as hold back budgeting. This practice too should be banned which will bring more accountability to the process. The amount that the discretionary funds spent is dwarfed by this. Millions are misused and the citizens don’t have a say or accountability from their elected representatives.